I've been rather neglectful of my website lately, to the point where its homepage consisted only of automated backups of my Twitter and Instagram accounts. Which would be okay if all I cared about was that the site somehow got updated, but instead I actually started to find it grating, as if I just came home and found the living room machine-efficiently reorganized by a swarm of those vaccuum cleaner robots: sofa propped up tall in order to minimize its footprint, my record collection used as floor tiling, books as a huge Christmas tree-like pile for easier retrieval or burning.

The thing is, when you aggregate (or, euphemistically, 'machine curate') too much, your voice is lost. I came to check on my site and realized how 'spammy' it looked. Ugh. So I made one important tweak: this site now defaults to a Weblog (remember those?) page stripped of all automation, so I actually had something of a more active role in getting it there ('active' meaning that I run a script that syncs my latest Tumblr post, but still). The ugly automated but useful (at least for me) Aggregator of Nearly Everything Worth Saving to My Own Server still lives at the Stream, where the Weblog may drown under a — well, a stream of stuff I write, share or photograph on my phone while unaware of the aesthetic consequences for my own website.